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Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and is the Media Research Center’s Director of Media Analysis. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.

Graham is a regular talk-radio and television spokesman for the MRC and has made television appearances on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and the Fox Business Channel. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, National Review, and other publications.

Graham left the MRC to serve in 2001and 2002 as White House Correspondent for World, a national weekly Christian news magazine. He returned in 2003. Before joining the MRC, Graham served as press secretary for the campaign of U.S. Rep. Jack Buechner (R-Mo.) in 1988, and in 1987, he served as editor of Organization Trends, a monthly newsletter on philanthropy and politics by the Washington-based Capital Research Center.

The March 7 Newsweek (NewsBeast) features an article titled "David Brooks Wants to Be Friends," but there's more bridge-burning than friend-making in this interview with James Atlas. Of course, he came up in Washington through conservative opinion journalism from the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and The Weekly Standard, but "something has changed." Conservatives are now more uncivil. Well, either that -- or his paychecks are now signed by PBS, NPR, and The New York Times:

But Brooks insists that something has changed in the past decade. Political discourse had grown coarse, he laments. Gone is the civilized era when “you had liberals and conservatives instead of Republicans and Democrats,” a time “before the parties devolved into teams,” each espousing its own “values” in voices grown increasingly shrill. For a high-profile journalist, he seems eager to keep his head down—it’s not a posture easy to maintain when he’s on TV every Friday night and his byline appears twice a week on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

“One of the toughest things about being a columnist is that people hate you,” he said. Hate is perhaps too strong a word; it’s not a sentiment Brooks tends to evoke in people. On the contrary, his balanced views are seen as strengths, not weaknesses.

The Radio Equalizer blog found an amazing statement from Rosie O'Donnell on her satellite radio show: the Wisconsin budget crisis "I feel like this is the most important issue our nation is facing right now, and has for the last fifty, sixty years." Forget the civil rights struggles, the Cold War, or the impeachment battles of two presidents. Rosie also emphasized the bizarre left-wing concept that Gov. Scott Walker was like Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak:

There's apparently over 100,000 people in the freezing cold in Wisconsin standing there, and they have been for the last eleven days? It took seventeen days to get the government in Egypt to stop abusing their citizens after thirty years of rule...

I believe the people of Wisconsin were inspired by watching the people of Egypt ... stand up to tyranny and dictatorship, a thirty-year dictatorship taken down in seventeen days of peaceful protest. The people in Wisconsin deserve our support ...They are us.

The saddest media bias on display this week was the desperate hunger and thirst for that slice of Ratings Heaven known as Charlie Sheen's Continuing Moral Collapse. He's been All Access Charlie, granting high Nielsens wherever he goes, speaking of how he is High on Himself and "bi-winning" with his two "goddesses" camped at his abode. Network interviewers have tried not to alienate their guest with tough questions. Washington Post TV writer Lisa de Moraes ably brought her trademark snark to this amoral parade. First there was ABC's 20/20 with Andrea Canning on Tuesday night:

"It's no secret that you have an affinity for porn stars," Canning told Sheen.

Beware the crystal-ball story that predicts a backlash -- a liberal newspaper will constantly find backlashes to predict wherever conservatives succeed. The Washington Post unleashed their clairvoyance on Friday in an Amy Gardner story headlined "Ohio GOP may invite backlash with tough stance on unions." It began:

COLUMBUS -- State Republicans took the toughest line yet against public-sector unions this week, delivering an early and significant victory for a slew of lawmakers elected in November.

Perhaps too tough. Democrats and even some Republicans said that the bold action and the uncompromising way it was carried out could boomerang on Republicans in the next election, in much the same way that the stimulus bill and health-care overhaul haunted Democrats in Ohio and elsewhere last year.

From the Making Mischief Department, NB reader Thomas Stewart sent in a NB link to Rosie O'Donnell's "Ask Ro" feature on Rosie.com. My headline on a February 27 blog post was "Rosie O'Donnell Offers 'Giant Hug' to Helen Thomas: A Summit of Role Models?" When faced with this link, O'Donnell simply answered "yes that is true".

Some think this could mean she was again complimenting Helen as a "role model," as she did when they met up at CNN. But the question was whether this was a "summit" of role models, meaning both women were stellar human beings.

Broadcasting & Cable put CNN talk show host Piers Morgan on the cover of its February 28 issue promising Morgan would take on Fox News. But his envy at their audience was showing. When B&C editor Ben Grossman told him he heard him slammed on Fox Business Channel, Morgan was delighted:

Good. If they’re talking about me, great. I want Fox to trash me every single day, nothing could be better. I love Fox’s aggression. I think CNN should take some of that aggression and fight fire with fire.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Friday, Sen. Jim DeMint argued that if PBS, CPB, and Sesame Street can afford lavish salaries for their executives, then surely they have the money to survive as private, non-commercial broadcasters. (He doesn't even mention how people chipping in $25 to "save" shows like Sesame Street might feel misled if they saw the salary numbers.)

PBS President Paula Kerger even recorded a personal television appeal that told viewers exactly how to contact members of Congress in order to "let your representative know how you feel about the elimination of funding for public broadcasting." But if PBS can pay Ms. Kerger $632,233 in annual compensation—as reported on the 990 tax forms all nonprofits are required to file—surely it can operate without tax dollars.

The executives at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which distributes the taxpayer money allocated for public broadcasting to other stations, are also generously compensated. According to CPB's 2009 tax forms, President and CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison received $298,884 in reportable compensation and another $70,630 in other compensation from the organization and related organizations that year. That's practically a pittance compared to Kevin Klose, president emeritus of NPR, who received more than $1.2 million in compensation, according to the tax forms the nonprofit filed in 2009.

We're headed toward seven years since Dan Rather disgraced himself by running a story based on phony Texas Air National Guard documents to ruin George W. Bush on behalf of that "war hero" John Kerry. Despite the liberal media's acknowledgment that Rather misled the public, he has relentlessly presented himself as a pillar of truth and probity.

Rather spoke on Tuesday night at the Newseum in Washington, DC to questions from Nick (Father of George) Clooney. Katy Adams and Nikki Schwab of the Washington Examiner's Yeas & Nays column reported Rather thinks he's the teller of uncomfortable truths, and the people objecting to phony documents are somehow the falsifiers and fantasists:

Clooney did take on the elephant in the room, though — Rather’s resignation from CBS News in 2005 for using bogus documents in a story about former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. “We reported a story that was true, that was an uncomfortable truth for a lot of people,” Rather said. “As a result to that I was asked to leave the anchor chair, and eventually CBS News.”

Here's more evidence that Newsweek keeps sinking as a credible "news" outlet. In their "Conventional Wisdom Watch" box in the March 7 issue, their top entry is an Up arrow for "Dirty Tricks." Media ethics, schmethics. The honored trickster is so-called "journalist" Ian Murphy of the "Buffalo Beast" for calling Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and pretending to be a capitalist, which he is certainly not. They explained: "Journo prank-calls Wisconsin governor. But is his refrigerator running?"

Typically, when Barack Obama declared he would not defend the Defense of Marriage Act, Newsweek gave an Up arrow for "Love," with a rainbow flag flying in the arrow. "Obama won't defend gay-marriage law. White House quits its stone-walling." Newsweek defines a Justice Department defending federal law as it presently exists "stone-walling."

Arianna Huffington is leading a left-wing charge to encourage an army of nonprofit organizations to fund local news outlets across the country. When liberal foundations start funding this trend, expect that local "in-depth reporting" to carry an aggressive liberal tilt. Bridget Carey of the Miami Herald reported:

In an era of cutbacks in journalism and small-town coverage, Arianna Huffington and other digital media pioneers gathered in Miami this week to inspire non-profits to fund projects that engage citizens and improve community news.

Rush Limbaugh infuriated the Left on Tuesday by suggesting the Left never concedes defeat. "But the moment you win the battle, and you know you've won - the war continues. Because these people, they're like cockroaches, they just keep coming back." The blogger "Louise" at the Daily Kos accused Limbaugh of being like a genocidal maniac in Africa:

If you were alive and sentient in 1994, as Limbaugh was, there is one immediate association you think of when you hear a radio personality call the "other side" "cockroaches" - you think of the Rwandan massacre. that is the word that Hutu radio used for months before the massacres to dehumanize the Tutsis, who would become the victims of mass murder perpetrated by their fellow citizens.

Amy Chua is a Hot Author for writing the book "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" about how she's raising more successful children by having higher expectations. She stirred up trouble with a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." A February 20 Washington Post story by Monica Hesse on a Chua appearance at the fashionably "progressive" Politics and Prose bookstore included a weird out-of-place slam on a conservative ad:

If "Tiger Mom" had been written by a woman of a different nationality ("Why French Women's Kids Don't Get Fat"), it might not have raised so many hackles. But this book came on the heels of that weirdly racist Citizens Against Government Waste commercial - the one where the futuristic Chinese professor cackles maniacally over the downfall of America - and at a time of concern about the U.S. economy and American children's ability to compete.

Finally, a book that both permissive lefty parents and frightened righty wing nuts can both get behind hating.

NBC's Today interviewed Obama U.N. ambassador Susan Rice on Tuesday about Libya. It was dull. It had no crackling opposition. There was one question doubting the effectiveness of sanctions. Despite plenty of conservative criticism about Obama's weak and delayed responses, and Rice's odd downplaying of the Libyan situation by skipping Security Council meetings to go to South Africa, there was no reading angry newspaper editorials or citing criticism from congressional opponents. This is not the way NBC played when John Bolton was U.N. ambassador under Bush -- not to mention that other black female named Rice. Here's the (brief) questions.

Let me start out by - you have called Qaddafi delusional and disconnected from reality. Plain and simple here, are we dealing with a mad man?

The media's policy on leaks is obviously "Good for me, but not for thee." It is okay for journalists to score scoops and win Pulitzer Prizes by printing everyone else’s secrets. It's okay for Julian Assange to goad the U.S. "military industrial complex" with WikiLeaks. But leak reporter E-mails, and you have no ethics whatsoever.

Politico broke the story that Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for House Government Oversighty Committee chairman Darrell Issa, may have shared reporter E-mails with New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich, who's writing a book on Washington's "culture of self-love.' Issa fired Bardella for upsetting the reporters.

The story included high dudgeon from Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris, in a letter sent to Issa: “The practice of sharing reporter e-mails with another journalist on a clandestine basis would be egregiously unprofessional under any circumstances,” Harris wrote. “As the editor-in-chief of POLITICO, my concern is heightened by information suggesting that POLITICO journalists may have had their reporting compromised by this activity.”

In The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti addressed the latest pairing of politician and six-foot PBS cartoon character/lobbyist. A man in a full-body Arthur the Aardvark suit was standing next to liberal Congressman Ed Markey. “Arthur,” Markey said glumly, “your silence is eloquent.” But "aardvark liberalism" isn't a natural fit for our high-deficit, high-unemployment era:

Now, for all we know, Arthur’s silence may well have been a protest against big government policies that rob Big Bird to pay Elmo. Or perhaps Arthur, being a reasonable aardvark, understood that cuts to public broadcasting most likely won’t result in the end of Sesame Street or Arthur. To the contrary: These million-dollar edutainment juggernauts are more than capable of thriving without government support. What’s more important is that, at a time when most of the adult world is engaged in the great task of disciplining government before the bond markets do it for us, representatives of one of America’s two major political parties seem less concerned with debt than with an oversized, nocturnal insect-eater of the order Tubulidentata.

On Thursday's front page of The Washington Post, reporter John Wagner wrote of how Maryland's top three leaders are Catholics but are "crossing the hierarchy" of the church by imposing "gay marriage" on the state: "But the presence of three Catholics at the helm in Annapolis hasn't stopped a same-sex marriage bill from wending its way through the legislature, triggering deep disappointment among church leaders as it suggests a waning of Catholic influence in this heavily Catholic state."

But it must have surprised readers that those "church leaders" Wagner referred to were nowhere to be found in this Post story, not even their names. Cardinal Donald Wuerl oversees the suburban Maryland counties of the Washington area, and Archbishop Edwin O'Brien oversees Gov. Martin O'Malley's Baltimore stomping grounds. Wagner somehow could not find them in his phone book. It's not as if these prelates have been quiet on the "gay marriage" issue in Maryland. Archbishop O'Brien just took great exception to the "hatemonger" label in his newspaper the Catholic Review:

Tavis Smiley is a hard-left talk show host on PBS. (He should admit that, since he authored a book called Hard Left.) You might remember him as the man that proclaimed that Christians "blow up people every day" in America. On his Facebook page today, Smiley promotes an interview he gave to one Myron Mays, where he talks about how he does "the Lord's work" on PBS:

PBS is a network that is watched by movers and shakers and by people who run the country, power players and other influencers. It's a great platform for us to try to empower them and try to enlighten them and quite frankly try to expand their inventory of ideas. It's a great platform to try to get them to reexamine the assumptions they hold. I think we're doing the Lord's work.

When Smiley talks of America's movers and shakers needing to "expand their inventory of ideas," he means expand it leftward. Smiley has gained a reputation as a "nitpicker" against Obama for not spending enough on African-American needs. He told Mays:

In his interview with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Sunday, NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory not only used a radical leftist blogger's "crank call" of Walker as an act of journalism, worthy of respect, he suggested that the leftist exposed Walker as "more of an ideologue than someone who wants to solve a serious problem." Doesn't that phrase perfectly describe Ian Murphy, the prank caller?

Can anyone imagine Gregory putting on Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards and playing back tape from the Live Action video stings and insisting that she's more of an ideologue than a problem-solver? The fairer question is if David Gregory is more of an ideologue than a problem-solver. Here's how Gregory insisted his liberal team's prank was respectable yesterday:

Sunday's Washington Post magazine recommended in its "Going Out Guide" that people catch "The Insider" when it shows at the Newseum as part of the "Reel Journalism" series with Nick Clooney, father of George Clooney and failed Democratic candidate for Congress. The added "bonus" is Mr. Phony Documents, Dan Rather:

When Jeffrey Wigand blew the whistle on his former big-tobacco bosses on 60 Minutes, he paved the way for major controversy and, eventually, this 1999 Academy Award-nominated film based on that controversy. The screening of the Russell Crowe/Al Pacino drama, part of Nick Clooney's ongoing series on journalism, will be followed by a Q&A between Clooney and former CBS newsman Dan Rather. We trust Rather will have a thing or two to say about CBS handles dicey news stories.

That's really polite in negotiating around the anchor's disgrace, like suggesting Pee Wee Herman "will have a thing or two to say" if he showed up at a pornographer's convention.

Almost the entire media skipped this chilling honor-killing verdict from Arizona on Tuesday, from Reuters: "An Arizona jury on Tuesday found an Iraqi immigrant guilty of second-degree murder for running down his daughter with a Jeep because she had become too Westernized." Faleh Almaleki killed his daughter Noor in October 2009 because she spurned his arranged marriage and was living with her boyfriend. Apparently, to report this is to be "Islamophobic."

NPR skipped Almaleki, but they noted the verdict in another horrific killing on Monday night's All Things Considered: Aasiya Hassan was beheaded by her husband Mozzamil in 2009 as the two headed a Buffalo television project designed to create better understanding about Muslims. NPR reporter Dina Temple-Raston's objective was to deny this crime was about Islam. Instead, she said, it was simply about domestic violence.

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